JLNotes Fall 2017

Welcome back to a brand-new school year! Im so happy to see each one of

you and many new faces in the 2017/2018 school year. According to reports
from our students and parents, this summer has been very productive, both
musically and recreationally. Im also happy to report that my summer has
been extremely busy with many diverse activities such as RCM examining in
Alberta, JVL SSPA Music in the Summer Festival in Orillia, Cremona
International Music Academy Festival in Italy, and trips to the United States.

Now fully reinvigorated, Im back into full-time teaching mode, and having already taken on
conducting of the RCM Taylor Performance Academy for Young Artists Junior String
Orchestra, I am now back to all my usual activities!

When I look back at the last school year, I can say that I am very satisfied with the progress
that all of my students have made and obtained tremendous results in the competitions
and examinations. And they too, should be very proud of their accomplishments! For some of
you, this year will be the last year of your high school career, and next year will be the start of a
new chapter of your adult-lives. Many of you will continue with music studies in universities
and conservatories around the world and some of you will peruse great professional careers in
other areas. However, the music, I hope, will always be a very important part of your life. This
year, Artur, Lucia, Nicki, Soulbin and Vivian graduated and began their studies at colleges and
universities. Soulbin has moved to the USA to study at the Longy School of Music in Boston,
Massachusetts to pursue her Bachelor of Music Degree for the Violin Performance, and while
Lucia is now a part of University of Toronto Bachelor of Music Education program, Artur has
commenced his studies for a Bachelor of Music, Violin Performance program also at the
University of Toronto and has already secured a position of a Principal Second Violins of the
Universitys Symphony Orchestra and joins Julia Mirzoev, who is a First Concertmaster to lead
the orchestra. Congratulations! If interested, you can see this Dream Team in action this
Friday, October 6 when UofT Symphony Orchestra gives its first concert of the season, with Uri
Mayer conducting works by Beethoven, Hatzis and Debussy.

There are a lot of music festivals and competitions that students have started already to prepare
for, and youll find the detailed information of most of our activities in the music competition
section of this newsletter.

With all that, lets hope that all of us will have a great year ahead and as always, have a great fun
with music!

Lastly, just a quick plea to all my active students, their parents and grandparents: as you probably
can see every week, our driveway undergoes an extensive renovation and a facelift with all the
beautiful landscaping around it, therefore where possible, avoid driving onto or parking on the
driveway (even for a short time!) Once the renovation has been completed, you still will not be
able to park there, as weve been advised by the landscaping company, to ask everyone not to
park there, since some cars may leak oil, which cannot be removed from the pavement. I am
sure, youll be able to find a curbside parking spot on our street, there are plenty of them
everywhere! Thank you!

News from JVL Summer School for Performing Arts
What a season! I really was taken by the commitment, attitude and discipline that our students
displayed during these gruelling 11 days of music making. It is heartening to see kids being so
passionately involved in all musical activities (even those, that they dont see as practical for
their instrumental skills, but incredibly important, such as ear training etc.) let alone their
instrumental, ensembles, chamber music, orchestras and of course the Musical Theatre! Both,
faculty members and the students alike thoroughly enjoyed the experience. All students had the
opportunity to flourish their skills as musicians, and successfully did so!
According to many e-mails I have received from parents, students and the faculty, the 16th
Season of JVL SSPA was a great success. I would like to share with you a letter that Ive
received right after the conclusion of this year Festival. It came from a parent whos children for
the first time attended the JVL. This unedited letter is reprinted with a great appreciation and
with the permission of sender:

Dear Jacob,

We all had an amazing time with all of you and your staff at the JVL music camp. Despite
being a family of 6 and each of my children having varied strengths and challenges, we all had
a fun, exceptional time. Not many places on this earth can accomplish this without a small
fortune payed for people to pleasantly and cheerfully cater to your every need.

Most importantly, John, Vivian, Eric and Evelyn became more confident as people and have a
redefined appreciation for the love of music. They embraced a resolution to be better every
day at the piano and theater challenges! What an accomplishment to have Vivian and John
sing on the last day! Both spoke freely of attending next year. Vivian wishes to continue with
theater and John is excited to begin violin lessons with Olga! Eric had a peaceful time
because the setting was spectacular and he was able to take gentile walks every day. Alina
had a soft, special way of pulling out performance to meet expectation. This allowed Eric,
and all my children, to perform confidently and do well with scales. Evelyn rose to so many
challenges requested from the staff. I know this to be her strength, but she was amazed to
see the confidence they had in her abilities. She returned home with shoulders square and a
poise gifted to her by her time at JVL.

All of your staff were professional, of high standards, loving and supportive. Most made
opportunity to speak with me individually during a convenient free moment during the 11
days. What an unexpected pleasure for me to meet such accomplished and amazing
individuals during a busy camp schedule. The parents who attended were also part of the
equation that made the daily camp routine a success. The support and encouragement they
all imparted on their children and students performing was refreshing and heart-
warming. This speaks to their character, but it also reflects your leadership and that of the
staff you selected. The mood and energy of all was contagious!

I wish for you and your family a very happy year. Thank you for all your talents shared and
those of your staff. See you in 2018!

Karen Davenport and Family
And I would like to take the opportunity and to congratulate everyone involved for the great
success we have had in 2017. Everyone has benefited from tremendous learning opportunities
and has experienced a lot of personal growth as musicians and as people.

We are now updating the information for the new 2018 season and I would like to invite you to
frequently check for the updates.

The 2018 season of JVL SSPA Music in the Summer Festival will commence on Saturday,
June 30 and will conclude on Tuesday, July 10, 2018.

The registration for 17th season of the JVL Summer School for Performing Arts International
Music in the Summer Festival will soon be open, and I look forward to seeing everyone again
in 2018!

Please dont forget to check the website www.MusicInTheSummer.com often for updates of
information.

Schedule of Activities and Events

Below, please find the relevant information regarding music festivals, competitions and
examinations for this semester.

Monday, November 6 ORMTA North York/York Region Branch Auditions

November 30 December 3 Unionville Music Academy Competition Deadline: October 23
Monday, December 4 ORMTA North York/York Region Branch Branch Recital
January 15-27, 2018 RCM Winter Session Examination Deadline: November 1
Spring 2018 Canadian Music Competition Deadline:November 13
February 3 - 4, 2018 Annual Students Recitals

Point of view
Below, please see a re-printed Strad Magazine article on a parental involvement in a child
instrumental practice.

Family Matters

Finding the right level of involvement in your childs instrumental practice can be a tricky
balancing act. OLIVER GLEDHILL offers parents some strategic guidance.

Finding the right level of involvement in your childs instrumental practice can be a tricky
balancing act. OLIVER GLEDHILL offers parents some strategic guidance
When your childs teacher ends each lesson with a reminder to practise, do you really understand
what this means? How best can you support practising? How involved should you be either in
practising or in the lessons? Here I shall try to offer some practical advice, drawing on the
findings of the available research evidence.
When your childs teacher ends each lesson with a reminder to practise, do you really understand
what this means? How best can you support practising? How involved should you be either in
practising or in the lessons? Here I shall try to offer some practical advice, drawing on the
findings of the available research evidence.
Elements of practice
First of all, you need to be able to tell the difference between practising and simply playing.
Practising is characterised by three main differences: it often needs to be slow, divided into small
sections, and it should be analytical or questioning.

Routine and environment

Once you and your child understand what practising is, you can help enormously by establishing
a routine. The first element of this is one of attitude, instilling from the outset that your childs
instrumental learning will be a long-term commitment to a valued activity, possibly for life.
Research by the Australian Gary McPherson (2000) found that the shorter the period of time that
children expect to continue learning an instrument, the less they achieve and the sooner they give
up.
You may find that choosing a regular time of day for practising helps your child build a pattern
of familiarity and normality. Earlier in the day or after a nap, your child might be fresher. Of
course, getting ready for school may make early morning practice difficult to achieve, and, as the
teenage years approach, the need for a lie-in may seem all the more important, which is perhaps
why a recent study (J.R. Austin and M.H. Berg, 2006) found that in the US only seven per cent
of instrumental students aged eleven to twelve practised early in the morning. They found that
distributed practice spreading it out across the week or into more than one session on the
same day can help motivation. Grace Rubin-Rabsons 1940 study found that distributed
practice can also help with memorising, though the benefits of such distribution favoured
learners who are less able; those who are more able may cope better with mass cramming.
However you organise the practising routine, do not worry that you will have to set aside large
amounts of time: twelve to fifteen minutes per day is quite sufficient for success in the early
stages, rising to an hour by the teenage years, except for the highest achievers at music school
level, who tend to begin to exceed an hour by the age of eleven.
Give some thought to the practice -environment: ensure a comfortable temperature, the right-
sized chair and a music stand. Reduce distractions from siblings, pets or the television. A good
habit to encourage is washing hands to avoid touching the instrument with sticky fingers.

Parental involvement
Once you clearly have in mind the three main elements of practising, and have given thought to
the practising routine and -environment, you may be wondering whether to sit in on your childs
practice, and if so, whether you should sit quietly, as a supportive presence helping to ease the
loneliness of the practice situation, or whether you should get actively involved.
Research evidence on the effectiveness of parental supervision of practice is mixed. J.P. Brokaw
(1983) suggested that a parent supervising home practice improves the childs musical
achievement, but neither S.A. ONeill (1996) nor S.F. Zdzinski (1996) found this to be the case
in their studies. If you are going to be involved in practice, the crucial factor seems to be that you
should get clear feedback from the teacher on each lesson, or sit in and observe the lessons -
yourself. That way you can see the teacher modelling practice strategies and observe how the
teacher relates with your child during the often stressful or frustrating learning process. You will
then be better equipped to carry through a consistent approach at home.
As a parent, you do not need to -understand all the technical terms -associated with playing your
childs -instrument, but instead you can pick up cues and prompts from the teacher to help give
reminders during practice.
For example, it may be useful to remember a prompt such as Wasnt that supposed to be the
third finger over on the D string? simply as a form of words, even if you have not fully absorbed
its meaning. If you choose to become actively involved in practice supervision, most studies
show that your child is likely to be weaned off such involvement between the ages of about
eleven and thirteen.
My own research has found that some parents make a conscious decision not to be involved in
lessons, believing that the one-to-one confidential pupilteacher relationship helps build
character and personality in the child through freedom of communication and rapport, and that
this outweighs any benefits gained from the parent being present.

Practising strategies
If you are going to be actively involved in practising with your child, there are some very useful
strategies to adopt, or to help your child to adopt, to make practice more effective, so saving time
and increasing the rate of progress.
Lets look again at the three characteristics of practising: slow, in small sections, and analytical
and questioning. If you can encourage your child to practise slowly, this will allow time for both
recognition and discrimination of errors: recognising an error means knowing that something has
gone wrong, but discriminating means knowing exactly what was wrong, and this clarity will
help to put it right next time.
If you can encourage the choice of small, manageable sections or sub-goals to work on, this will
help greatly to focus attention. Several studies have consistently found that, left to their own
devices, children as novice learners most often play through a piece from beginning to end
without stopping. Try to resist the temptation to encourage your child to practise just the nice
tunes or to play the whole piece through too often simply because this gives you pleasure as a
listener.
You can help the development of an analytical or questioning approach to practising by asking
questions about the music or about an error made, but be careful to let your child reach the
answer heuristically through assisted self-discovery. Learning through self-discovery is more
meaningful to the child and so the knowledge gained will be better retained. Prompting your
child with the answer too often will tend to cause emotional friction. Try a no matter how long
they take.
A specific area where you can encourage analytical questions in string playing concerns tuning
and finger placement. Beginners devote most attention to decoding notes on the page: with just a
handful of notes learnt, a different line or space up or down is seen to equal a certain finger
number. Often beginners do not notice whether the correct finger is in the right place on the
string (in tune), or even if it is on the right string at all. Hearing accuracy of tuning usually
develops later, as aural connections between notes gradually become learnt patterns, or
schemata. Meanwhile, other musical concepts rhythmic accuracy, dynamics, structure and
phrasing, and expressivity all fall increasingly far down the list of priorities. You may be aware
of some of these more complex elements, and if so you can help focus your childs attention on
one or two, while trying not to overload them with ideas.
Encouraging your child to memorise is one of the best ways to help take the notes off the page
and release cognitive capacity for thinking about all these aspects of music. Musical memory is
built up in four ways: aurally (through the sound), -visually (through the appearance on the page
or on the instrument), kinaesthetically (through the feel of the movements on the instrument,
such as getting used to the feel of a long-distance shift) and analytically (through questioning).
Two practical ways in which you might learn to highlight analytical features for your child are
using exit and entrance points, and chunking. For example, if a phrase ends on a B and, after a
bars rest, the next phrase begins on a D a minor 3rd up, you could help your child to notice that
interval connection as an aide-mmoire. Similarly, you may be able to highlight where a
fingering or bowing pattern is copied in sequence (or has one recognisable difference). Noticing
such patterns leads to the idea of chunking, or linking small patterns of notes into small
meaningful units. If you look for chunking patterns with your child, it helps make the piece seem
a lot shorter and simpler.
Close observation of similarities and differences in chunking leads on to another strategy that
you may find helpful: variability, or encouraging your child to practise in different ways
perhaps experimenting with variations in bowing patterns or rhythms. The doctoral study of
Fiona Pacey (1993) showed that variability can be effective in string players learning. On a
larger scale, and probably with help and advice from the teacher, you might vary the pieces being
practised. However, some children, at certain stages, like to focus on limited areas, or perhaps
one piece, and this too may provide valuable material for a more in-depth holistic approach.

Psychology of learning
As well as providing a comfortable physical environment in the way that the practice room is set
out, try to keep in mind your childs psychological comfort. Though at times it may be difficult,
try to resist getting irritated or annoyed if your child seems slow to catch on or wanders in
attention. Gaining new knowledge with imagination which simply means making associative
links, like links in a chain, and building these up into patterns means leaving behind, to some
extent, what the child already knows and what feels safe and familiar, in order to make a leap
into the unknown. A calm, safe, non-judgemental and supportive atmosphere is needed to feel
free to imagine.
In this kind of risk-taking necessary to get to the next stage in their practice, some children will
exhibit what Carol Dweck (1986) called mastery behaviour, seeing their own progress as
cumulative and in small steps. Many, however, will experience periods of more helpless
behaviour, not wanting to attempt the next stage for fear that it will prove too difficult and
overwhelming. You may recognise a tendency towards a mastery or helpless learning trait in
your own child, which can help you show understanding in support of your childs learning. It is
important to remember that children showing helpless behaviour are not less able; in fact, Dweck
(2000) found that some helpless children are among the brightest and most skilled.

The role of rewards and fun

While your child is learning to take risks and going through this step-by-step and cumulative
process, you will find that you need to offer lots of encouragement and praise, especially in the
early stages, before the successful connections of flowing melodies provide their own -
motivation. How you offer this praise is important: it will not be helpful in the long run if you
praise every attempt as Wow!, Lovely! and Wonderful!. We know that it is better to direct
praise towards what Jere E. Brophy and Thomas L. Good (1974) call learning goals and Bret P.
Smith (2005) has termed task goals, rather than towards performance or ego goals. This
means identifying what was good about the playing and how it has improved, praising this
progress and achievement and so encouraging the development of intrinsic motivation, rather
than setting up a system where the child gets praised for less understandable reasons.
If the reasons for praise given are unclear, your child may develop a desire simply to please you,
or to win rewards such as sweets, stickers, football shirts, outings and other such extrinsic
motivators. However, dont be too hard on yourself, because Mark Lepper and his colleagues
(1973) found that with a long-term activity such as music learning, with lots of delayed
gratification, it may be necessary to keep a child engaged through extrinsic motivational rewards.
Finally an issue that, from a teachers perspective, crops up fairly regularly when a childs
instrumental interest may be waning: a parent often making requests for more fun in the lessons
or for more jazzy pieces to be set for practice. Try, as the parent, to remember that motivation for
practising increases or reduces according to a complex mix of influences. What children expect
to get out of the activity of music, how useful it is thought to be for the future, and how much it
is valued, will be balanced against how much effort is perceived to be required to produce
worthwhile results. This is called expectancyvalue theory. Also important to children is
having a strong self-efficacy belief: that they think they are good at playing and feel confident
in their knowledge
and skills. There are -complicated motivational issues at work here, and they are often not
helpfully solved with a quick-fix solution.
(The Strad)
Recommended Concerts

Being so involved with music leaves me little time to go out and enjoy the concerts and
performances by some great soloists coming to Toronto. So far I am going to hear Janine Jansen
on December 5 at the Koerner Hall, and at the Roy Thomson Hall - James Ehnes on May 5,
Vadim Gluzman on June 9 and Daniil Trifonov on June 16. Of course there are many more
performances throughout the year, and I truly hope that you will be able to attend at least some

Finale

I hope youve enjoyed the reading! Please always share

with me your ideas and suggestions. You can always reach
me on: 416-735-7499.

Always yours,

Jacob Lakirovich

(courtesy of Alexander Koren)

37 Cedarpoint court, Vaughan, Ontario L6A 4P7 Canada Phone: 289 553-7498